In this case, a Point-Ed Hockey Stick....

I needed something completely different. Just for a day, varying the routine of work to dinner at home to entertainment to falling down again. None of that is complaining, since the work has been decent, the dinners filling and the entertainment, well, entertaining. Although latter has had its share of occasional weird moments. Like the very odd moment seeing on the screen for about two seconds of Succession, where a local Buffalo bank wound up getting a totally unexpected product placement in a very tense election night episode:
 


The Evans Bank logo is on a tv screen in a conference room where the two sibs are sibbing. The show is filmed in the oft-used Silvercup Studios in Queens, so my guess is they just had Spectrum News on the on-set monitor and didn't think anybody would notice. Our newspaper supposedly has a reporter on the story, although I’ve not seen anything about it there yet.


And then two nights ago, there was a scene in the next thing we watched.

Soooo, in Episode 6 of Mrs. Davis, you know the naked guy drinking the martini in the scene where Simone is transported to be with Jesus while having sex with Wiley?

No? Okay. There really IS a naked guy drinking a martini in the scene where Simone is transported to be with Jesus while having sex with Wiley.

But if that isn't weird enough for you (and good Lord it better be)?

The naked guy drinking the martini in the scene where Simone is transported to be with Jesus while having sex with Wiley is played by Barry Livingston, the youngest Son in the 60s sitcom My Three Sons.

Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, Fred McMurray!

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Still, after Tuesday- featuring over six hours of driving to, avoiding a detour on the way to, meeting, and then representing, a client in a deposition, I really needed to have something else, someplace else.

There was nothing at all completely different about where I wound up, since I hadn’t been in Rochester for over a week and had things I could do there, workwise, even if I didn’t particularly have to do them right then. It was WHAT I did there yesterday that got me out of whatever funk I was starting to approach.

One thing I was not going to attempt to approach there was a golf course. The Oak Hill Country Club on the east side of the city has been in regular rotation for major professional golf tournaments in most of the years I’ve lived or traveled there. The U.S. Open, the Ryder Cop, and now both of the major events sponsored by the PGA- the governing organization run by the players themselves. At least, that is, the players who have not aligned themselves with a bonesaw-wielding Saudi Arabian dictator.

The annual PGA championship, for the best current golfers, got moved to the month of May a few years ago, and this was Rochester's first time hosting it on its new schedule. The biggest concern around there, of course, would be the weather. It has been known to snow around here as late as the middle of May. Hell, I once saw snow flurries over Seneca Lake on the Fourth of July. (no, Siri, not “cynical lame.“) There were two days of practice rounds for the golfers,Tuesday and yesterday, with seasonable temps, but then word got out that there would not be snow overnight into the first day of the actual tournament today, but there might very well be frost on the golf course. The temperature was scheduled to go into the mid 30s overnight, which I can attest it indeed was around about 11 o’clock last night. It will, as with many things, be important later.

Oak Hill is actually fairly close to my east side suburban office there, a biking distance away. Parking for the event, not so close. Signs on the way in indicated, as of mid-morning yesterday, that the closer guest parking lot was already full and that the overflow lot was off an expressway on the far west side of the city, a good 30 minute bus ride from the course. I had no plans or desire to go- golf, for me, matches the old definition of "a long walk, ruined," and the sporting aspect of it has never appealed, either.

Instead, I stopped at a client's on the way over to that side of town to pick up a signed document, and, around the corner from her house,....



I found him!

Later in my travels, closer to Oak Hill, I found proof that something important was going on over there:




Look, Boss! De Blimp! De Blimp!

That was on the way back from a second client document pickup and filing at the end of the workday. I returned to the office to drop off the client's check, to apparently forget to bring several of my other papers home with me, but also to make an effort to get in to see the other sporting event of the week- where it's SUPPOSED to be cold:



HOCKEY! HOCKEY! HOCKEY!

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I mentioned last week that the Rochester Americans, Buffalo's top minor league affiliate in hockey known affectionately as the "Amerks,"* were continuing on in the post-season even after the Sabres missed qualifying for the NHL tourney by all of a point. After losing their first two road playoff games last month, Rochester roared back to win the next two at home and then finished off Syracuse on enemy ice to advance to a second best-of-five round against the minor league Toronto team known as the Marlboroughs, shortened to Marlies.

That's right. We're named for Truth, Justice and the American way. They're named for a cigarette.

This time, the Amerks took care of their road business before last night and came home with a chance to send the Marlies off to Ook Hill or whatever golf course the major league Maple Leafs are currently using. Amerk attendance hasn't been the greatest in recent years, but by the time I got back to the office to check on tickets, they were down to only a handful in the furthest reaches of the Broad Street end of the building.

I hadn't been in there for hockey in, well, I can't remember how long.** (Pack rat that I am, I probably still have my stub someplace.) It was definitely last century, and I went with my brother-in-law Charlie and possibly with Emily with us. I'd waited to see if he might be around to be my plus-one for the game, so when I never heard, I just booked a near-back-row seat for me, myself and I.

Through Ticketmonster.

Remember the fun I had last time I used them for a Broadway production in Buffalo? Course you don't, but this was it. From that, I learned that (a) you can only get in with a mobile ticket on your phone, (b) that it has to be the actual site or, better, in their app on your phone (Screenshots won't get you in, it says right on the screenshot), and (c) the "app on your phone," in the case of MY phone, connects to their Australian site and has no record of my password, much less any purchase.

No matter. I fiddled and fumbled, got the magic actual mobile ticket to appear in a tab on the phone, grabbed a bite, and found a parking space just two blocks and a building away from the arena with plenty of time to get in well before the opening faceoff.

One very large building, mind, but one I know well. Rochester's state court "Hall of Justice" is a big part of it, and I know every nook and cranny of how to get into, out of and around it. Except not at night: stairwells are gated off and you can't get there from here. So after much doubling back and cutting round, I presented myself for admission to the game about 10 minutes before the scheduled start, and went to display my Golden Mobile Ticket....

Mine, and about 10,600 others in the by then sold-out crowd, all hitting their cellular tower and wifi simultaneously. Like they said, the screenshot would NOT get me in, and I fumbled with getting the real thing to load, the password again to be cracked, and finally, just as the Star Spangled Banner was finishing, my tickee was scannee and I got to my seat, still standing to take that first picture of the ice surface about 10 seconds into play.

Only then did I notice that Toronto was scoring the first goal of the game almost as I was snapping the shutter. It was 1-0 Marlies before I'd even taken off my hoodie. Other teams and home crowds would have been deflated. Not these, though: Rochester tied it within scant minutes, gained a power play lead almost as quickly afterward, and never looked back from there. It ended with the Amerks winning 8-4, claiming the AHL Northern Division crown, and advancing to what will now be a best-of-seven series for the Eastern Conference title and a ticket to the league's Calder Cup finals. The Amerks have several of them in their trophy case, but the last time they brought one home?



Two seasons after we left town for Buffalo, 1995-96. Their coach, John Tortorella, now (at least for now) behind the NHL Philadelphia bench after other stops in New York and Columbus. The rest of their team back then, mostly minor-league lifers, few of the Sabre prospects who filled most of the roster (and scoresheet) of last night's victory. Just a hard-working gritty bunch who got the job done, as this current crew just might if they can get past the "rough tough Hershey Bars," another of the league's legacy franchises.

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Hockey games have three 20-minute periods of play with equal length intermissions between. I usually amscray before the end of a period to get in line for food or potty before they get impossible, and did so both times last night. I also explored; in addition to the lobby display of the past Cups, I scored a $20 t-shirt to remember the night by, and made a couple of kids happier. One maybe 10, the other closer to 3, were waiting in line with their mom and dad for ice cream, my traditional game-ending food item at baseball games. When I got to the head of the line, I let them both go ahead; they'd waited long enough, and they thanked me. Hopefully they're raised more kindly than the pre-teen in the crowd next to me joining his dad, after a missed penalty on a Marly goon, in a chant of REF YOU SUCK! REF YOU SUCK!

I also looked for the team mascot, known simply as "The Moose." He's a vestige of a long-demised Rochester FM radio station I listened to Dr. Demento on down in Ithaca, using a 20-foot antenna cable with tin foil at the end. Never saw him up close, but I did get a picture of him during a between-faceoff promotion on the arena's Whatevertron:



After the seventh goal, Toronto pulled their goalie to try to make it close, but they got nowhere, and in time, the chant of SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP! filled the building, along with one fan bringing the hardware:



An Amerk hit the empty Toronto net with seconds left, and 8-4 was your final. Getting back to the car was easier; there's a tunnel from the arena to the parking under the Hall of Justice, and from the other end of that I took a much more direct walk back to my car on the nearby side street, only to discover that my tire pressure light had come on.

Yep, remember that frost warning? That also affects pressure gauges. I found a 7-11 with an air hose, got them back within tolerance, and was safe, home and happy by 11:30.

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Two final victories, then, to finish today with:

While my screenshot was useless to get in to the hockey game, I decided to try it for its other purpose. After that second Amerk goal in the first stanza, the announcer and scoreboard told us that we had just won a free medium coffee and donut at Tim Horton's, just by presenting our ticket stubs.

I do have to say that Timmys sometimes drives me craycray with their mobile app and with promotions on it of offers which have tons of different rules before they'll let you use them. But today, I walked in to one near our house with nothing more than a copy of my mobile ticket from last night's game, and my word that there was a promotion on the scoreboard that all fans got a free medium coffee and donut. What did I get? No argument, no delay, no "that's Rochester locations only;" they honored the offer.
Sabres Number 2 would have been proud of them. The store AND the Amerks:)




I then came back after that to find my printer connection had been fixed at no cost. The service tech literally tried fixing it by sticking a wireless adapter into it with tape, but he eventually found a workaround using a cable that will serve me perfectly well and will no longer require an internet wi-fi connection to get data to and from this laptop when I'm there.

And with that, this report is in its final minute of regulation....

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Except for the footnotes:

* The nickname is pronounced "AAAAH-murks," with the distinct Western New York emphasis on the nasal AAAAAH! sound. When I first moved here in the fall of 1984, Ronald Reagan made a Rochester stop on his re-election tour, and when presented with a REAGAN 1 team jersey, he pronounced it as "the Uh-MURKS." Fortunately, nobody pretended that the emperor was right about that.

** I may have said previously that I hadn't been to an Amerks game at all since that 90s (probably) one with Charlie. That's not quite correct, either, because I did attend the outdoor game between Rochester and the Cleveland-ish AHL team at the Red Wings' stadium on a frigid night in late 2013. Even posted aboot it here, though most of the photos from their original LJ or FB source no longer display.